" Here is the ideal introduction to satire for the student and, for the experienced scholar, an occasion to reconsider the uses, problems, and pleasures of satire in light of contemporary theory. Sati
Nestled in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, Williamstown is home to one of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the country, Williams College. In this engrossing and entertaining book
This book explores the way in which Milton's poems served as a rich and fruitful resource for the English poets of the eighteenth century. It refutes the old argument about Milton's allegedly 'bad influence' and challenges suggestions that great writers generally inhibit or oppress their successors. Regaining Paradise argues that what interested eighteenth-century poets was primarily Milton's garden myth and that the best writers typically found Milton, not a burden, but an inspiring resources available for their appropriation. Regaining Paradise cuts across some of the boundaries that traditionally divide English studies. It looks at Milton not in a Renaissance but an eighteenth-century context and it combines the perspectives of literary history and literary theory.
The poetry of the mid - and late eighteenth century has long been regarded as primarily private and apolitical; in this wide-ranging study Dustin Griffin argues that in fact the poets of the period were addressing the great issues of national life - rebellion at home, imperial wars abroad, an expanding commercial empire, an emerging new 'British' national identity. Taking up the topic of patriotic verse, Griffin shows that the poets, like many contemporary essayists, sermon writers, and political journalists, were engaged in the century-long debate about the nature of 'true patriotism'. Griffin argues that canonical figures - James Thomson, William Collins, Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper - along with less canonical writers such as Mark Akenside, John Dyer, and Ann Yearsley ask how poets might serve and even save their country, and take their place in a broader tradition of patriotic verse.
This is the first comprehensive study of the system of literary patronage in early modern England and it demonstrates that far from declining by 1750 - as many commentators have suggested - the system persisted, albeit in altered forms, throughout the eighteenth century. Combining the perspectives of literary, social and political history, Dustin Griffin lays out the workings of the patronage system and shows how authors wrote within that system, manipulating it to their advantage or resisting the claims of patrons by advancing counterclaims of their own. Professor Griffin describes the cultural economics of patronage and argues that literary patronage was in effect always 'political'. Chapters on individual authors, including Dryden, Swift, Pope and Johnson, as well as Edward Young, Richard Savage, Mary Leapor and Charlotte Lennox, address the author's role in the system, the rhetoric of dedications and the larger poetics of patronage.
Swift and Pope were lifelong friends and fellow satirists with shared literary sensibilities. But there were significant differences - demographic, psychological, and literary - between them: an Anglican and a Roman Catholic, an Irishman and an Englishman, one deeply committed to politically engaged poetry, and the other reluctant to engage in partisanship and inclined to distinguish poetry from politics. In this book, Dustin Griffin argues that we need to pay more attention to those differences, which both authors recognised and discussed. Their letters, poems, and satires can be read as stages in an ongoing conversation or satiric dialogue: each often wrote for the other, sometimes addressing him directly, sometimes emulating or imitating. In some sense, each was constantly replying to the other. From their lifelong dialogue emerges not only the extraordinary affection and admiration they felt for each other, but also the occasional irritation and resentment that kept them both
Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937) was a distinguished modernist American architect, landscape architect and town planner. His work attracted world-wide attention in 1912 when he won the international
